Barbie

The genesis of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a primal scene. Girls cosset baby dolls on the twilit savanna, aping the primates from the “Dawn of Man” sequence that launched Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. They rehearse maternity without enthusiasm because, Helen Mirren intones on voiceover, this is the only vision of a future they have. Her delivery is august: she parodies authority by having it, the way “Thus Spake Zarathustra” does. A plastic colossus stands in for the galvanic monolith. Barbie has liberated girls from the porcelain prison of motherhood. It is a stellar opening.

For Gerwig, this is the Dawn of Woman: not being made from Adam but breaking free from his rib cage. Her tongue appears to be planted in cheek, but male self-seriousness, exemplified by Kubrick, is the butt of the joke. It implies the patriarchal dissonance Barbie later rails against—that Gerwig wants to be held in the same regard as a male auteur like Kubrick while cutting his pedestal down to size. This must be a primal headache.

Over the course of the film, Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) journey from the girlboss paradise of Barbieland to the real world so Barbie can confront the girl who “owns” her about why her perfect doll-house life is suddenly being blemished by cellulite and meditations on mortality. But Ken, who has only ever existed in relation to Barbie, feels “seen” in the real world. Like a modern Brometheus, he smuggles the patriarchy home with him, and the Kens scupper Barbieland’s female regime because the Barbies lack the antibody to fend this foreign concept off. Meanwhile, male Mattel executives struggle, in vain, to literally put Barbie back in her box.

So what is the patriarchy? It comprises horses and high-fives, Pavement and Matchbox 20, Grease and The Godfather—a great popular critique of capitalism and toxic masculinity that was, incidentally, based on chancy I.P. There is a single gutting indication of real malevolence (emphasis on the “male”) squeezed into a montage: a man in a business suit first tells Ken that his company has taken strides toward gender parity—but then levels with him that it is all a face-saving façade once he realizes he’s in the presence of a fellow bro. But the film makes no distinction between a deeply rooted system of oppression and manhood writ large.

This is because, in the final analysis, Barbie is a fable—a very thoughtfully devised fable, I think, but ultimately a closed loop. The patriarchy-stricken Barbies aren’t victims of a bloody coup. This is a children’s movie, after all. They simply forget their self-respect and put up with the Kens’ behavior. In effect, to accept traditional gender roles is to be brainwashed. And once the dolls are reminded that these norms are a social construct designed to rob them of agency, they snap out of it. All it takes to topple the system is to be aware of it, and to be aware of it is to reject it. Barbie typifies the folly of online discourse: it prohibits disagreement. Its assumptions pile up.

Aware of their peers who struck Faustian bargains with Disney or D.C. or Marvel, Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, with whom she wrote Barbie’s script, seem intent on putting Mattel’s fortune toward a positive cause—and they know full well that aligning this doll with realistic beauty standards is like rebranding Exxon-Mobil as a clean-energy powerhouse. (The one character who levels these criticisms in the movie violates Godwin’s Law by accusing Barbie of fascism, which reduces Robbie to tears. This critic later undergoes a silent change of heart and becomes a Barbie booster. She gets pink-pilled, evidently.) So the filmmakers affectionately use this iconic toy, which has been loved and hated as a symbol of feminism and sexism since 1959, as a platform for mass group therapy. It’s a benevolent gesture, but there’s a lot to unpack. There’s a reason therapists don’t offer diagnoses to strangers.

That being said, Barbie is touching. America Ferrera’s stemwinder about how all women suffer from the impossible demand that they have to be everything to everyone is a cri de coeur. (It is also an artful way to make male critics squirm over questioning Gerwig’s creative choices, but let it pass.) Overall, I found the movie to be impassioned and a joy to watch: it lacks the liquid plotting of, say, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, but that is part of its clunky charm. Gerwig envisioned her Barbie to be more like scrappy Pinocchio than a sleek superhero—even if it is not the doll’s nose that grows in the end. As an artist, Gerwig may object to the social pressures that compel women to become mothers, yet her work conveys the blessings and trepidation of maternal love. She leaves delusions of male grandeur behind. But it’s her playfulness that I find liberating.

This is clearly in evidence in the performances of the leads. Gosling is a marvelous himbo, a drip with drip—his male privilege is manifest in his innate ability to stir up dumb thirst, and make one laugh at how in thrall one is to it. As is always the case for women, Robbie has the more difficult part. Barbie is a character for whom even simple feelings are a disturbing experience, and Robbie navigates this with her whole body; the emotions are real but at arm’s length, like a cage constructed by a mime. Robbie glows up and down and up again. But the point is that she glows.

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